I’m a 20-something living in Boston. My day job is working as a software developer at a startup, but to find me in the evenings just follow the trail of thread and listen for the soft whir of the machine. The aforementioned sewing machine is a hand-me-down Elna from my mother. The sewing skillz are also hand-me-downs from my very talented mother. Read more.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Tag: clothing

Man were these quick! I think it took me about an hour and a half to crank them out. I bought this awesome orange fair isle print jersey at Sewfisticated a couple weeks ago with the intent of making thermals out of it, and Megan Nielsen’s Virginia Leggings pattern was released with perfect timing.

I’ve only recently returned to the world of sewing. My mom, a prolific quilter, taught me how to sew as a kid, but my impatience and total lack of interest in mainstream sewing patterns led me to abandon it for years. I got into a lot of other crafty pursuits- knitting being chief among them, but my sewing machine was left in a corner to gather dust.

One Sunday earlier this year, I was wandering around the SoWa vintage market and caught sight of a quirly little boutizue fabric store. On a whim, I decided to venture in. Once inside, I was totally wowed by the racks of independent designer patterns- Megan Nielsen, Collette Patterns, By Hand London, Victory -they had it all. I had never been in a fabric store like it before. My mother had only ever taken me to quilt shops, and my only experience with patterns had come from paging through catalogues at JoAnn’s. So of course that meant the big 3- Butterick, McCalls and Simplicity- and I had always found their patterns to be pretty out of date and frumpy.

Seeing all of those amazing independent pattern companies inspired me to dig out my machine and give sewing another try. The first thing I made was the Macaron dress by Colette patterns.

As I wrote in my last post, I struggled with the pattern. I was pretty rusty….. and this was probably not the best choice for my first project in years. I ended up going back later to fix a lot of the mistakes I made the first go round- inserting the zipper wrong, sewing some of the pleats down in the wrong direction, etc. Here’s the original:

I finished the dress just in time to wear out to dinner for me and my boyfriend’s one year anniversary, April 19th. That day, as some of you may recall, also happened to be the date of the massive manhunt for the Boston marathon bombing suspects. The hunt shut down the entire city. We literally weren’t allowed to leave our homes- so that’s where we had our anniversary dinner.

I also originally sewed the dress with a contrast waistband, which made it look sort of smocklike, so I went back and changed that as well. (bonus points, in this shot I’m wearing my mission maxi)

Eventually I may get around to re- reinserting the invisible zipper, since the last time I did it I put it in backwards, making it totally VISIBLE . Whoops….